Juicy Sunday

Glorious weather on the balmy side, the hip regional juicer turning his farm into a holiday market and two boys ready for some adventuring - reason enough to hit the road and to drive out to the lush hills of the "land of the five lakes".



First stop of course - the open pit barbecue serving some of the finest wuerstel since the invention of the pig. Plus some fries which could drive Belgium into bankruptcy (oops, sorry, no financial crisis jokes, Europeans are a bit touchy, now that we're about to lose our common currency and the romantic notion of a unified continent with it).

Then it was off to the various activities. Karl got his first workshop experience.



For a small fee you could get a piece of wood already pre-sawed in the shape of either a boat or a sword (guess, which Karl picked), a workbench and some tools. Obviously there was quite a few father-son teams all excited about some genuine male bonding.



Karl did pretty well considering that he is normally more into the theory than into the praxis of things. He got a kick out of rounding the edges with a heavy rasp. The carpenter made him a real leather handle. And so Karl paraded his self-made weapon around the apple orchards like a true knight.



While Karl and I were pretending to be anywhere near talented with sharp and pointy tools, Fred and Henri discovered a choo choo train pulled by a miniature locomotive with a real steam engine. It's as nerdy as it gets, but Henri couldn't get enough (no matter that he still needed parental guidance i.e. balancing, so lucky Fred got to ride around the choo choo train quite a few times).



Henri did not like the concept of finiteness. But off we went to the hills of the apple orchards.



He got over the end of train rides when he discovered that you can run really fast downhill smack into the arms of another parental unit and get both the thrill of speed and the kick of being held tight in one single run (notice his elder brother in full attack mode going against a horde of robber-knights in the background).

Later we did need a break.